Restorative justice schemes will have to follow new government protocols to secure state funding, the Northern Ireland Office has said.
Criminal justice minister David Hanson said the new guidelines, published yesterday, had the police at the centre of the process and safeguarded the rights of offenders and victims.
The SDLP, however, criticised the protocols as damaging to the rule of law which would "weaken efforts to build a lawful society and leave working-class communities in danger of very rough justice".
Restorative justice schemes operate in both loyalist and republican communities across Northern Ireland and seek to deal with low-level crime and anti-social behaviour.
By intervening at an early stage, they seek to "restore" justice between the offender and the victim by mediation.
Loyalist schemes incorporate the PSNI, however nationalist equivalents have no such inclusion although scheme activists insist they do not stand in the way of anyone going to the police.
The protocols will "put in place a structure which will provide for effective engagement between community-based schemes and the criminal justice system in dealing with low-level crime", Mr Hanson said yesterday.
The guidelines were non-negotiable and "will be closely scrutinised by the Criminal Justice Inspectorate", he added.
However, the SDLP's Alban Maginness said he remained concerned that the government was prepared to fund restorative justice schemes without "proper inspection arrangements, a statutory complaints mechanism and without requiring that restorative justice groups be impartial".
The "culture of paramilitary control" would mean that people will be too scared to complain, he said.
Alliance Party justice spokesman Stephen Farry welcomed the protocols and described them as a major step forward. "There are marked improvements compared to earlier drafts," he said. "It is clear that the police are now going to be central to such schemes, and that CRJ [ community restorative justice] schemes cannot deal with cases without referrals passing through the police and prosecution service."
However, he said the other work of restorative justice organisations dealing with non-criminal anti-social behaviour is not to be regulated.
"There is inevitably an overlap between such work and involvement with criminal cases, and the conduct with respect to one impacts on credibility in dealing with the other," he said.
"Any community restorative justice scheme that does not accept these protocols but continues to operate should fall under heavy scrutiny from the lawful authorities."